Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/377

Rh intensely from cold, particularly during the long hours between midnight and dawn, when it was impossible to get any warm food at the post-stations, and when all our vital powers were at their lowest ebb. More than once, notwithstanding the weight and warmth of our outer clothing, we became so stiff and chilled between stations that we could hardly get out of our pavóska. Sleep, of course, was out of the question. Even if the temperature had not made it perilous, the roughness of the road would have rendered it impossible. Under the conjoint action of a dozen howling arctic gales, and four or five thousand pounding freight-sledges, the deep snow that lay on this part of the road had drifted, and had packed into a series of huge transverse waves, known to travelers in Siberia as ukhábi. These billows of solidified snow measured four or five feet vertically from trough to summit, and fifteen or twenty feet horizontally from crest to crest, and the jolting and banging of our heavy pavóska, as it mounted the slope of one wave and plunged into the hollow of the next, jarred every bone and shocked every nerve-ganglion in one's body. I finally became so much exhausted, as a result of cold, sleeplessness, and jolting, that at every post-station, particularly in the night, I would throw myself on the floor, without blanket or pillow, and catch five or ten minutes' sleep while the horses were being harnessed. At the lonely post-station of Kuskúnskaya, about eleven o'clock one night, I threw myself down in this way on a narrow plank bench in the travelers' room, fell asleep, and dreamed that I had just been invited to make an extempore address to a Sunday-school. The school was in the church of a religious denomination called the "Holy Monopolists." I inquired who the "Holy Monopolists" were, and was informed that they were a new sect consisting of people who believed in only one thing. I wanted very much to ask what that one thing was, but felt ashamed to do so, because it seemed to me that I ought to know without asking. I entered the Sunday-school room,